Critical Essay by Ethan Goffman

In the following essay, Goffman explores the significance of the black thief in Mr. Sammler's Planet, maintaining that the thief “is a compact, dramatic version of a recurring Euro-American mythologization: blackness as the primitive, the carnal, the return of the repressed.”

Representations of blackness as dangerous, primitive, and highly sexualized, deeply implanted in European and American society, inescapably infiltrate Jewish American literature. Perhaps the most concentrated such image appears in the form of the black thief in Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), a work lumped by Mariann Russell together with Bernard Malamud's The Tenants and John Updike's Rabbit Redux as reducing blacks to “a convenient metaphor for...